Monday, November 10, 2025 – Walking thru Bloomingdales and always admiring the elevators

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HIGHLIGHT NOVEMBER 10 ON CALENDAR
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Street Life Committee
PUBLIC HEARING
Monday, November 10, 2025 – 6:30 PM
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The Art Deco beauty of Bloomingdale’s

59th Street streamlined and

stylized elevators

Monday, November 10, 2025


Ephemeral New York



Issue #1571

Bloomingdale’s early six-story store on Third Avenue and 59th Street, opened in the 1880s, was made of red brick, cast iron, and brownstone.

By 1930, this fashion emporium had expanded all the way to Lexington Avenue. Instead of sticking with the tired design materials of the last century, the final incarnation of this department store giant was built to be an Art Deco showpiece—a symbol of the modern machine age.

Through the decades, the store’s interior has been redone to suit the retail shifts of various eras. What hasn’t changed are the doors of the elevators that greet you when you enter via Lexington Avenue.

Sleek metal with bold geometric motifs and sans serif numerals, the elevators date back to 1930, when the flagship store was completed, according to this elevator database (though apparently they were modernized in some way over the years).

Art Deco is celebrating its 100th birthday this year, and it’s a powerful style that shaped the look and feel of Gotham during the Jazz Age and Depression years. Skyscrapers across the city exemplify Art Deco design—as do smaller, less significant places like elevators.

Or “sky carriages” as 19th century Bloomingdale’s called them. This retrospective of the company’s history states that Bloomingdale’s was the first department store in North America to install a sky carriage and in 1898 the company financed the invention of the “inclined elevator”…aka, the escalator.

CREDITS

Ephemeral New York

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